The present disclosure relates to an image processing apparatus and an image processing method, and more specifically, to improving image quality for a multi-view image when coding an image with multiple views.
In recent years, there exist apparatus that handle image information as digital data, and in this regard conduct highly efficient information transfer and accumulation, such as an apparatus compliant with a technique such as MPEG that compresses by discrete cosine transform or other orthogonal transform and motion compensation, for example. Such apparatus are becoming widespread in broadcasting stations and general households.
Particularly, MPEG-2 (ISO/IEC 13818-2) is defined as a general-purpose image coding format, and currently is widely used in a broad range of applications for professional use and consumer use. Furthermore, an image coding format called H.264 and MPEG-4 Part 10 (hereinafter designated H.264/AVC (Advanced Video Coding)) is becoming standardized, and although more computation is demanded for its coding and decoding compared to coding formats such as MPEG-2, a higher coding efficiency can be realized. Also, with the coding of images by coding formats such as such as MPEG2, MPEG4, and H.264/AVC, it is typical to adjust the bitrate in order to obtain a higher coding efficiency. With bitrate adjustment, adaptive quantization taking vision characteristics into account is conducted. For example, in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-138938, quantization is conducted by adaptively switching a quantization scale and an adjusted quantization scale according to the coding size of the current image, on the basis of a given parameter computed during the coding of a prior image.